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Improve Google Ranking with Blogger

There are around 321,000,000 results for site:blogspot.com in the Google search engine. This means there are 321,000,000 indexed pages for blogs that are hosted in Google Blogger. Yet with this large number of pages, you’ve probably noticed that only a few of these blogs manage to get a decent Google ranking for most common blogging topics. Why? And can you duplicate their success? Keep reading.

A quick list of the most common blogging topics is published here: http://promediablog.com/blogging-tips-10-most-popular-blog-topics-to-make-money-online/. For certain key terms, a few sites stand out. For example, for "film reviews blog," two results deserve further study: commonguyfilmreviews.blogspot.com and telugu-film-reviews.blogspot.com. For "pet blogs," internet-pets.blogspot.com is worth a look. For "fashion and jewelry blog," we’ll look at three results: dcelestine.blogspot.com, in-vogue-jewelry.blogspot.com and profashionjewelry.blogspot.com.

This article will examine the SEO characteristics of these blogs and what makes them rank in Google for their targeted terms. The information gathered by this observation can be used by aspiring bloggers to optimize their blogs for the best results in Google.

Content is Still King: Consistency and Quality

One of the common characteristics of most these blogs is that they emphasize writing quality content on a consistent basis.

Another thing worth observing is the large minimum number of indexed pages on these blogs. Based on the sample provided, you can observe that most of them have indexed pages greater than 50; in short, all of the blog owners have written at least 50 posts for their blog.

A high number of blogs in Google’s top 10 even have hundreds to thousands of indexed pages. Regarding the quality of the content, these blogs feature original content, and most of their blog posts are more than 400 words long.

These blog authors write useful and convincing content with the sole purpose of meeting the demands of their readers. The blogs’ readers, especially those that are coming from Google, expect quality information, and these blogs deliver. You might observe that their content is not spammy in nature, and that the authors write naturally for their readers.

Another thing worth observing is that these blogs do not contain too many ads on their pages. Well, you might have seen that most of Google’s “blogspot” users set up blogs just for Google AdSense. As a result, their blogs contain a lot of ads, but little content, which is a mistake.

But the top ranking blogs do not contain distracting or obtrusive ads. Instead, most of them even have no ads, or if they include an advertisement, it is clearly separated from the content, and limited.

This implies that these blog authors are not blogging just for the purpose of making ad income; they are blogging to write great content which is helpful for their readers.

Finally, they are not only writing quality content on a single occasion; most of these blogs are consistently updating and adding content.

To summarize what we’ve learned:

Blog authors at the top wrote a lot of quality content. Most ranking blogs have at least 50 blog posts. Writing content is really hard work and a time-consuming activity, so make sure that you are creating a blog that showcases your expertise in a specific topic or niche (not just a simple hobby that you have just recently learned or things that just interest you).

This will ensure that you will never run out of helpful topics and ideas to write in the long run, which you can share with your readers. This is a very important blogging requirement that will help you stay motivated to write.

Most users of Google Blogger start a blog just to share something which they are not really good at; they’re not an expert on that topic. As a result, they are not greatly motivated to continuously write for their readers. They then abandon their blogs, and all of their marketing efforts to get known and rank in Google, at some point in time.

Write useful, original and convincing content for your readers. Since content is king, you should pay attention to this if you need to improve your Google ranking.

The logic is that Google ranks only quality content, and quality content is original, helpful and informative. Quality content is a strong factor in attracting organic links in the long run. This is why it is so important.

Text content should not be spammy in nature; it should be naturally written. Do not fall into the mistake that some other bloggers make – stuffing their pages with spammy tags and keywords.

High-ranking blogs do not contain too many or obtrusive ads. Ads need to be separated clearly from your content. Make sure the content is more prominent than the ads. Obtrusive ads can make your blog appear less trusted to readers, which can affect your search engine reputation in the long run.

Regularly update your the content.

These bloggers are active in their communities. Below are the things that these bloggers have in their blogs that promote community involvement:

Facebook connect and social tools – These let readers share information in Facebook. They also let the author connect with their readers on a social platform to further discuss the topics relating to their blogs.

Twitter - Another way for a blog author to get involved with his or her community of readers and followers is to use Twitter. Here is an example: http://twitter.com/commonguymovies

Letting users share information through social bookmarking buttons – Many if not most of a blog’s readers may have social bookmarking accounts, so if they like your story they might share it in Stumble upon, Digg, Delicious etc., thus increasing your blog’s exposure.

If you want to know why its important to get involved with your reading community, the following are the obvious reasons:

By getting involved, you are interacting with your readers which makes them feel that you are a real person, not just a virtual or an anonymous blogger who is only interested in making money from their readers.

The more you get involved with the blog community, the more your readers trust your blog and the information you give them.

Focusing on earning your readers’ trust is a higher priority than focusing on attracting visitors from search engines. Trust can make you an authority, which will have strong impact on your blog ranking and long term reputation.

The more authority and trust you have from your readers, the more likely that your blog will earn “organic links,” which is often regarded as one of the most important ranking factors in Google.

You cannot become an authority and a trusted resource if you do not get involved with your community, contribute and interact with your readers. These readers will often link naturally to blogs that they trust and know the author.

Other tools you can use to get involved in the community include Google Connect and LinkedIn. You can even get involved simply by answering user comments in your blog.

Here’s a summary of tips:

Get involved with your readers by using social networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Friend Connect and LinkedIn.

Use some social bookmarking tools to let your readers easily share your story on some of the most popular social sites, such as Facebook, Digg, Stumble upon, etc.

Talk about and discuss issues with your readers, on your Facebook page, user forums and in your blog posts’ comments section. This makes them feel that the blog author is a helpful, real person that they can talk to. This makes it easy for them to trust you, as well as your blog information.

Earning trust and becoming an authority is one of the great methods of earning natural links for your blog in the long term.

Quality Link Profile

You might ask: “How did these bloggers manage to get quality links?”

Below is a snapshot of inbound links using Yahoo Site Explorer for sample ranking blogs:

One thing you will immediately notice is that these are not links coming from forums, blog spam comments or even link directories. The links are coming from quality websites in the same niche. For example, examining the inbound link relevance profile of dcelestine.blogspot.com:

You can see that a high percentage of the inbound link pages have the topic of “fashion,” which directly relates to dcelestine.blogspot.com’s blog topic. Related backlinks have a strong impact on Google rankings.

Another example is the link relevance profile of telugu-film-reviews.blogspot.com:

So, to answer the question: "How did these bloggers manage to get quality links?"

They get the links from related blogs or websites.

Although the way these links are earned cannot be confirmed, it is most likely due to partnership with related sites because of the author’s involvement in the blogging community.

It is very easy to get links from related websites, as long as you earn your readers’ trust and become an authority on your website’s topic.